


Differences

by eluna



Series: When We Were Young [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s01e01 Pilot, M/M, POV Dean Winchester, Past Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-08 22:50:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16438343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluna/pseuds/eluna
Summary: “You know, I just don’t get you, Sam,” says Dean from the driver’s seat, pissed-off and covered in muck from the swan dive he took an hour ago. “The sudden obsession with eating healthy, okay. The fact that your apartment doesn’t have a single salt line laid down, I can understand, if you wanted to leave the life so badly. But now you’re telling me you want to go to law school so you can practice corporate law?”





	Differences

**Author's Note:**

> New readers: you don't need to have read the rest of the series to understand this, though I recommend checking it out if you enjoy this one-shot!
> 
> One timestamp to go \o/

“You know, I just don’t get you, Sam,” says Dean from the driver’s seat, pissed-off and covered in muck from the swan dive he took an hour ago. “The sudden obsession with eating healthy, okay. The fact that your apartment doesn’t have a single salt line laid down, I can understand, if you wanted to leave the life so badly. But now you’re telling me you want to go to law school so you can practice _corporate law_?”

Sam makes a bleating sort of noise, something between a chuckle and a gasp, and his head bumps against the glass he’s laid it against as Dean navigates a particularly sharp turn. “Real estate law, actually. It’s really quite interesting—”

“That’s the best you have to say for yourself? That it’s _interesting_? You could—you could be helping real people out there as a defense attorney, keeping the good guys out of serious prison time—”

“The _good guys_?” squawks Sam. “Dean, I’m not going to devote my life to protecting and lying on behalf of drug dealers and rapists—”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that,” says Dean thinly. He could _strangle_ this body-snatcher who doesn’t seem to understand or, worse, care that the American prison system is heavily racist and biased against drug addicts and other nonviolent criminals—but then, if Dean is being honest with himself, he’ll admit that Sammy has never seen eye-to-eye with him about anything to do with poverty. Sam has always too greatly resented the way they grew up; Dean can still remember a fourteen-year-old Sam who all but moved into the middle-class Solaires’ house in Clear Lake like it was some kind of refuge from the dirty, impoverished life he had at home. “Become a prosecutor, then. Spend your career building a case against the real bad guys. Why throw it away on some… some…”

He looks over and makes eye contact with Sam, who actually _blushes_ and looks down. Moments like this, it’s all Dean can do not to throw down whatever he’s doing, pin Sammy to the nearest hard surface, and kiss the daylights out of him—but that’s over now. He’s lucky enough that Sam agreed to come to Jericho with him; no way does he still want _that kind_ of a relationship, and anyway, no way is Dean going to continue to hurt his little brother like that when two and a half years ago he swore off of doing so any longer.

Sammy clears his throat. “I never signed up for having to have a life that’s more meaningful than everybody else’s. I just wanted—I just _want_ —to blend in and find something to do that makes me happy. Or are you too much of a miserable bastard to understand that?”

“What I don’t understand is how you could possibly be happy practicing _real estate law_ when you know how it feels to save people.”

“I never asked to save anyone, Dean,” says Sam, and for a second, Dean could swear that Sam’s no different at all from before—that he’s looking at the same seventeen-year-old kid who came home one day and announced that he was leaving for Stanford.


End file.
